Deepening Or Branching?

It’s kind of odd seeing all the new blog hate posts. Well I guess I wouldn’t call them hate posts but they all seem to be actively discouraging people from making blogs unless you can offer a service or affiliate marketing. Even then they all casually talk about having a couple hundred followers in order to do that.. How do they expect people to get up to a few hundred followers without learning from failure? Everything goes “Use perfect grammar, attract clients by turning yourself into a minor authority on a topic, find a popular niche and model yourself after that. Well sure you can generate a following that way but at that point you’re no longer really blogging are you? You’re just turning yourself into a business clone.

I don’t want to ever forget where i’ve come from. So many blogs seem to evolve into such large consumer fed constructs and lose the voice of the author which originally attracted people to the blog, I don’t want to become just another toneless voice on the internet. Another one of those blog owners who lurk in the comments of similar blogs in order to learn how to connect into that source or readers by seeing which of that blog’s posts generated the most traffic over the past couple of months. From their they usually go into guest posting on that blog in order to siphon traffic to their own blog. Now i’m not saying that all guest posting is evil or has an underhanded intent as it can sometimes be as simple as two collaborators deciding to help each other out.

Being perfectly honest ‘guest posting’ does somewhat intrigue me do to it’s potential to grow an audience, plus it’s been used to great success by a lot of big name blogs out there. I just feel that it would be rather impudent to the owner of that blog, regardless i’m sure i’ll get over some of my moral compunctions regarding the issue over time.

Anyways i’ve now started reaching a point where i’m going to need to decide if I should slightly branch out what I post about or if it would make more sense to just dive deeper into what I seem to have made as my core topic, any thoughts? Since I like to add an aspect of tranquility when I can, I was thinking of doing some posts on the effects of loneliness and self isolation. Specifically how one’s mindset and the thoughts they view of as normal begin to change over prolonged isolation, how one’s priorities and concerns seem to slightly shift. I’d also like to get into talking about some heavy topics such as social anxiety, depression, and eating disorders seeing as both have had quite a prevalent effect on my life. All of which I have experience with personally through both myself and with those who I hold dear.

Originally today I had planned to write something about why there’s so much dislike for hosting ads on your blog but I started to somewhat see what everyone’s point was so I became uncertain of the tone I wanted the post to have. The main concerns seem to be that ads take people away from your page, add extra loading time for when people are attempting to view the site, and that you have no control over what the ads are showing people so your post/site could end up advertising products or services of which you’d really rather not be associated with. Each and every one of those seems like a good reason to me however like I said earlier in this post I don’t understand why new bloggers aren’t encouraged to experiment for themselves. Why aren’t we left to learn to grow from our failures, especially with all of these options built into the site? Hence why i’ve currently got ads enabled.

I’m probably going to disable the ads after some time since I don’t really like all of the clauses within the ad hosting agreement, especially the one’s where they can enact a penalty if you post or talk about something they disagree with. I mean i’m not currently planning to post anything with ‘Any content that is inappropriate or not “family safe”.’ however what constitutes inappropriate is apparently decided upon at their discretion. I don’t enjoy the thought of just laying every post at their mercy. They also have control over anything ‘unlawful or promotes unlawful activity’ now i’m not planning to set out to violate laws with posts but being a Canadian citizen rather than U.S. citizen there’s almost certainly a few discrepancies in our laws that i’m unaware of. One of the biggest examples I can think of is what if I decided to make a post about the benefits of CBD which is one of the chemical compounds in marijuana? Marijuana is legal here in Canada however i’m not sure if every state has legalized it yet in the U.S. which could potentially make any posts about it “unlawful”.

I should probably specify that at the moment i’m not currently planning to post about anything marijuana related but there are a ton of benefits from it and ways it could be applied to meditation. Heck there’s even history of it already being strongly prevalent among spiritual groups as a way of communing with the divine/your higher self/the collective consciousness. There’s even a ton of recorded medical benefits aside from the spiritual ones. Huh, maybe I will end up posting about it after doing more research on whether it would be permitted or not. Anyways if you made it all the way to the bottom of this train-wreck of a post than I both thank and congratulate you. I was a bit distracted yesterday leading to such a long pause between posts resulting in things being a bit unstructured, or at least more so than usually. Soon i’ll be back to turning this blog into a nice tranquil refuge from your daily lives, I hope to see you join me on this journey. ^-^